November 25, 2010

The publishing sensation of 2010 is Thilo Sarrazin's million selling work of statistical analysis, Germany Abolishes Itself. You might think that the New York publishing industry would be abuzz over rumors of plans for how to put out a similar product to obtain megasales. But all I hear is crickets chirping.

Didn't Pat Buchanan have a book about more or less this called Death of the West a few years ago that was published by a mainstream publisher?Wikipedia tells me he had another one called State of Emergency.

And Samuel Huntington had a book about this too, called Who Are We?, with a mainstream publisher.

I just returned from a fascinating country called Murraystan, population 300,000,000.

As in the United States, the distribution of IQ is Gaussian with mean 100 and standard deviation 15, and the median household income is $50,000.

It’s a paradise for libertarians. Everyone is paid their worth, with no redistribution of wealth to laggards: from each according to his ability, to each according to his ability.

In fact, there is a perfect correlation between IQ and income.

If you’re a bleeding heart liberal feeling sorry for the poor, note that in Murraystan work ethic also perfectly correlates with IQ, so before getting sympathy the poor should work harder. All other positive attributes are likewise correlated. Every man marries a woman of equal intelligence, and IQ is 100% heritable, so inequality persists over generations.

The elites of Murraystan understand that inequality is inevitable, since humans differ in intelligence, work ethic, conscientiousness, and all other positive attributes, and differences are explained by scientifically validated bell curves. Interfering with natural levels of inequality would incentivize laziness and trample moral rights of the productive.

That being said, business leaders of Murraystan are very upset. Unlike the United States, public policy hasn’t promoted a winner take all transfer of wealth to the top 1% over the past 30 years. The government doesn’t set up trade and immigration policy for the purpose of giving employers maximal leverage over wage earners, corporate governance rules don’t limit shareholder oversight of executive compensation, and the public won’t bail out the richest Murraystanians if they drive their companies into the ground.

Rather, the unequal societal division of wealth and resources is exactly the variance that Murray or Sarrazin can explain through Gaussian-distributed intelligence. That’s why less than 0.01% of Murraystanian households live below the $20,000 poverty line, and the richest 0.01% of households make only $77,893 per year, an income distribution that wouldn’t be contemplated in the US under a Eugene Debs dictatorship.

American liberals have nothing to fear from bell curves, which if taken seriously provide arguments for progressive taxation. All economic systems lead to MORE inequality than an archconservative dystopia designed irrespective of fairness to optimally reward talent.

I just returned from a fascinating country called Murraystan, population 300,000,000.

As in the United States, the distribution of IQ is Gaussian with mean 100 and standard deviation 15, and the median household income is $50,000.

It’s a paradise for libertarians. Everyone is paid their worth, with no redistribution of wealth to laggards: from each according to his ability, to each according to his ability.

In fact, there is a perfect correlation between IQ and income.

The elites of Murraystan understand that inequality is inevitable, since humans differ in intelligence, work ethic, conscientiousness, and other correlated positive attributes, and differences are explained by scientifically validated bell curves. Interfering with natural levels of inequality would incentivize laziness and trample moral rights of the productive.

That being said, business leaders of Murraystan are very upset. Unlike the United States, public policy hasn’t promoted a winner take all transfer of wealth to the top 1% over the past 30 years. The government doesn’t set up trade and immigration policy for the purpose of giving employers maximal leverage over wage earners, corporate governance rules don’t limit shareholder oversight of executive compensation, and the public won’t bail out the richest Murraystanians if they drive their companies into the ground.

Rather, the unequal societal division of wealth and resources is exactly the variance that Murray or Sarrazin can explain through Gaussian-distributed intelligence. That’s why less than 0.01% of Murraystanian households live below the $20,000 poverty line, and the richest 0.01% of households make only $77,893 per year, an income distribution that wouldn’t be contemplated in the US under a Eugene Debs dictatorship.

American liberals have nothing to fear from bell curves, which if taken seriously provide arguments for progressive taxation. All economic systems lead to MORE inequality than an archconservative dystopia designed irrespective of fairness to optimally reward talent.

To sell to whom? It might sell in the academic market but that's even doubtful. Statistics are only sexy to Americans when it involves financial matters, and these days those are generally negative numbers!

From my perspective in the hinterlands, most white American boobs can only intuit there's a demographic tsunami on the horizon - let alone investigate it. A good deal of them even deny what their eyes tell them. My guess is that the numbers who would buy Sarrazin's book would be one or two times the number who read Sailer's blog, Taki, and VDARE.

To Anonymous #2: I've run across occasional liberals who believe every vicious, racist thing that they accuse conservatives of believing. Their tone is conspiratorial, and they want to invite me into the conspiracy. They say that the way to control minorities is the liberal method of indirection. I don't know, of course, how common this view is. People who argue pro-life issues also run into very racist liberals on a regular basis. I have little basis for this speculation, but I think liberals would be ready to go back to racism of the old-school Woodrow Wilson type if it were made fashionable, and liberal politicians could keep power without black votes. Maybe you will eventually be able to bring your liberal friends up to the level of Mr. Sailer's Citizenism.

Today, I realize I was a naive, bull-headed, ignorant person whose voting patterns and personal choices (no kids) were leading to self, familial, and national annihilation, proving myself evolutionarily unfit.

Way to go, Pat. You were ahead of your time. Sorry I didn't appreciate you at the and that I didn't wake up earlier.

BTW, several years ago, I stopped watching MSNBC. How do the silly ones on there respond to Pat?

"The elites of Murraystan understand that inequality is inevitable, since humans differ in intelligence, work ethic, conscientiousness, and all other positive attributes, and differences are explained by scientifically validated bell curves. Interfering with natural levels of inequality would incentivize laziness and trample moral rights of the productive."

Gee, I seem to recall a Murraystan in which those of average and even below average IQ made a very decent living.

In the community of Murrystan in which I was born and raised, average IQ sorts owned their own homes, often owned expensive recreational vehicles such as boats, often owned vacation cabins in the Sierras (Lake Tahoe, their favorite place), got a few weeks of vacation each year, one week devoted to taking their kids to Disneyland or Knotts Berry Farm or the San Diego Zoo, or Marineland, or skiing at one of the many resorts around Tahoe, etc.

All this was usually attained on one income earned at one of the factories along our river. Sometime the moms worked as checkers in the local grocery stores or clerked at places like a dry cleaners; some even worked themselves at one of the factories. However, most of this life was provided by the dads while moms stayed home with the kids.

Many of these moms and dads had no high school diploma, and to reiterate, most were average IQ.

That was my USA Murraystan, a place where you didn't have to be above average to do pretty well for yourself and your family. In fact, the white collar guys of the town? The insurance salesmen? The accountants? The school principals and district administrators? (This, of course, was during a time in which a school principal was respected.) All the guys that wore a tie and white shirt to work? They made less than the guys who worked at the factories and got paid really well for overtime and double time.

Your family doctor and dentist were the guys who lived in the biggest, nicest homes, but your doctor was never home to enjoy that home. He was either in his office or making his rounds at the local hospital and then driving around in a car not even as nice as that owned by the Fibreboard pipe fitter, a union man. That doctor was always making house calls.

I guess the guys making the best money in my Murraystan town were the plant managers, who, like the doctors, never had any time to themselves or for their families. They'd no sooner get home than be called back to the plant by a shift manager, who himself made a pretty doggoned good buck for a guy with nothing but a hs diploma.

Yeah, good old manufacturing Murraystan was something, wasn't it? A place where guys of all IQs lived the good life. In fact, my memory tells me that the guys of middling IQ had it better than the docs and the factory heads who were the high IQ sorts. Those guys? They were always working to keep people from dying and being sick and to keep those plants running smoothly.

A book like this could be published in the US, but it would almost certainly not be promoted heavily enough to make any best-seller lists.

It's important to remember that not all books compete on a level playing field. Serious non-fiction occupies a small share of the American market's attention, and even that small share is dominated by a few celebrity-authors who have the clout to get themselves heavily promoted in periodicals and on the electronic media. The conservative publishing houses offer an alternative avenue, but the mass-market books they promote are almost entirely driven by celebrity.

"Gee, I seem to recall a Murraystan in which those of average and even below average IQ made a very decent living."

I believe this commentator missed the point of the counterintuitive Murraystan example, which was that (because of properties of the bell curve) a society with America's per capital GDP but perfect correlation between IQ and income would have more equality than a wild socialist could ever imagine, with virtually no poverty and virtually no extreme wealth.

Hence, the argument was that America's extreme concentration of resources in few hands cannot in any way be proportional to the greater talent or ability of the ultra rich.

A consequence is that liberals and progressives are not being very smart when they try to censor discussions of how talents and abilities are actually distributed.

Another indication of this suppression of Freedom of Speech in the US, is that I could order a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "200 years together" in an ordinary conservative book mail-order shop in Germany.Apparently his book is not available in the US.

One consequence of having so many opportunities to go to college now is that almost every high IQ individual who wants to go can do so. 50 or 100 years ago, many people, either by economic circumstances or having children at a young age, were forced to work and give up the idea of higher education. The result was that many intelligent people were in work-a-day jobs in which they were over IQed if it were. The reverse would have also been true. Being less of a meritocracy, nepotism and discrimination were rampant. This meant that if you had a job working for the factory owner’s son (Edsel Ford) you were doomed to suffer the same mediocrity.

"Translate Herr Saracen's book into English, and publish it on the Internet."

They'd use copyright infringement laws to slow you down. Even Steve might not want to risk a lawsuit--after all, he owned the copyright on the Half-Blood Prince book. Sarrazin's company could come after him.

I wonder if you could stick it on the Pirate Bay? Once they try hard enough to shut you down, it would raise enough buzz to help disseminate the thing...

I'm going to disagree with the Murraystan example on a few choice points. The point that economic inequality cannot be proportional to IQ is sound, and it's pretty obvious that there is, in fact, a system which has been co-oped to allow the rich to become richer at everyone else's expense.

However, what Murraystan seems to be harking back to is a 1950s America, which, in addition to being white, also enjoyed relatively little competition from the rest of the world. Without smashing Germany and Japan and, now, China into rubble again, we're not going to get everyone to buy our cars.

Also, a while a low IQ may be a handicap, success is not directly or even monotonically proportional to IQ. Sure Bill Gates is pretty smart, but it's in the field of business, with its reliance on personality, hard work, and luck, that he excelled. The 120-IQ salesman does better than the 140-IQ scientist. The free market rewards personality, not intellect. Of course, stupid people are more likely to dissipate their gains, but personality and work ethic are more important than IQ.

Some of the comments here on the Bell Curve and 'Murraystan' implicitly bring out something interesting. At least some desirable stuff in life seems to be governed not so much according to a strictly gaussian distribution, but by some flavor of a Power Law.

It is worth noting that Power Law phenomena would exist even if there were one unitary gaussian distribution of absolutely every quality within mankind. Which is to say, if you're in a group with a lower population amount of a valuable quality, any Power Law effects would make any deficiency more pronounced; put differently, it would make the results even less evenly distributed, even more 'unfair'.

The probable existence of differing population distributions of valuable qualities is certainly one thought that cannot be thought, but the existence of the Power Law on top of this? Seems like that might really twist the knife.

I'm not so sure. I've read all these books by Buchannan and Murray that the commenters imply are effectively the same as Sarrazin's, but significant differences exist. Sarrazin's criticims are more direct than the Bell Curve and more statistic-heavy than Buchanan's. Sarrazin has scored a direct hit on the weakest point of leftist political-correct ideology, which neither the Bell Curve nor Buchannan ever quite managed.

"Another indication of this suppression of Freedom of Speech in the US, is that I could order a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's '200 years together' in an ordinary conservative book mail-order shop in Germany.Apparently his book is not available in the US."

Jewish publishers won't publish it and non-Jewish ones won't do it out of fear of being blacklisted by Jewish dominated media.

"the unequal societal division of wealth and resources is exactly the variance that Murray or Sarrazin can explain through Gaussian-distributed intelligence."

I enjoyed the travelogue from the strange land of Murraystan, but I completely fail to understand this argument... So let's stipulate that IQ correlates perfectly with income.

How do you get a result that <0.01% of the population would make $20K/yr and <0.01% make $78K/yr? Those percentiles correspond to IQs of 44 and 156, respectively, fer chrissake.

What functional relation are you assuming between income and IQ? An infinite number of functions Income=f(IQ) have a perfect correlation between IQ and income. Thus one can "explain" an infinite number of unequal divisions of wealth via Gaussian-distributed intelligence.

The function Income = a e^ b IQ , for instance, has a perfect correlation between income and IQ, but it realistically assigns a steep (and growing) elasticity between income and IQ for a rough qualitative approximation to the Smart Fraction effect.

I think that the commenter who remarked that Sarrazin's book is really quite different from both The Bell Curve on the one hand and Buchanan's work on the other is on the right track.

The Bell Curve essentially established the premise that different ethnicities and races differ as well on distribution of cognitive abilities based on genetics. Yet it also was pretty careful in advancing recommendations based on that fact, mostly granting that various value systems will ground quite distinct policy responses.

Buchanan, on the other hand, mostly (so far as I'm aware) never really strongly argued for the premise that the differences between ethnicities and races were based on genetics. He simply assumed that the differences were already pronounced enough and long lasting enough that we should greatly curtail immigration.

What Sarazzin seems to have done is to combine both of these points -- one scientific, one value laden, and each toxic in its own right in today's culture -- into one overarching argument.

That would be, I'd think, quite hard for any reasonably mainstream publisher to swallow -- most especially because the culture of today is only less, not more, forgiving of such transgressions than it was a decade or more back.

In this week's New Republic, Leon Wieseltier calls Sarrazin's book "vile," and explicitly compares the Turks to Jews of the 1930's. Amazing to me. This is the same guy I loved for calling Cornel West's work trash. Apparently he doesn't understand that blacks would have called that opinion "vile."

"I'm not so sure. I've read all these books by Buchannan and Murray that the commenters imply are effectively the same as Sarrazin's, but significant differences exist. Sarrazin's criticims are more direct than the Bell Curve and more statistic-heavy than Buchanan's. Sarrazin has scored a direct hit on the weakest point of leftist political-correct ideology, which neither the Bell Curve nor Buchannan ever quite managed."

The real issue here is Sarrazin is German, a member of the nationality that is supposed to shut its mouth on race forever. IF A GERMAN CAN SAY STUFF LIKE THIS, IT MEANS ANYBODY CAN SAY WHATEVER THEY LIKE ON RACE. Charles Murray wrote a controversial book, but he'd sucked up to Jews 100% and 24/7, and indeed he even wrote the book with a Jewish guy. (Steve Pinker and Larry Summers, both Jews, have also raised the topic of sexual and racial differences in IQ.) These topics are taboo, but somewhat okay if the 'right kind of people' raise it. Summers got in trouble at Harvard but still remained a big guy and even got appointed to serve Obama(or Obama served him).

So, if Sailer says blacks may have lower IQ, that is very bad. But if Pinker says the same, it's kinda okay. Though Murray got in trouble, he had all the Philosemitic and neocon credentials. Sarrazin also sounds philosemtic BUT he is a German, and that means he better shut up and apologize to Jews forever and ever. He better not say stuff that pisses off Jews(because if Germans are allowed to say stuff like this, it means the whole discourse on race has changed.) It all depends on WHO says what. Leon Wieseltier in a recent TNR column says Sarrazin's book is 'vile' and that Sarrazin's view of Muslims is like German views of Jews in the 18th and 19th century. Never mind TNR worries constantly about Israeli demographics and its publisher Martin Peretz constantly bashes the Muslim/Arab culture and mentality. (It's amusing that Jews bitch and whine about others seeing them as outsiders when, in fact, Jews have insisted on their outsider-and-separateness for 1000s of yrs. Jews wanna maintain their outsiderness--even as elite insiders--while demanding that we see them as 'one of us'. What chutzpah!)

For years, Jewish neoconservatives and right wing Israeli parties have been calling for the deportation of all Arabs out of Israeli territory. Forget Muslim immigrants; many Jews don't even want native Muslims living amongst them.

Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones at Thilo Sarazzin.

Jewish publishers won't publish [Solzenitzyn's book] and non-Jewish ones won't do it out of fear of being blacklisted by Jewish dominated media.

It seems that, more than genuine anti-semitism, what many Jews fear is a realistic appraisal of their role in society. They almost welcome hateful anti-semitism, which can be dismissed as such and used to close ranks, but live in mortal fear of being analyzed in an objective, critical but not unsympathetic manner which acknowledges their identity as a separate group.

Jews wanna maintain their outsiderness--even as elite insiders--while demanding that we see them as 'one of us'. What chutzpah!

Bingo. You captured some of the self-contradictory rationalizations of Jewish psychology that I'm trying to get at. (I'm Jewish, btw, and generally philo-semitic, but also exasperated by many of the same Jewish phenomena often pointed out here.)

"To be fair, Pat is not very friendly to Israel, so it's to be expected that supporters of Israel would be critical of him."

False.

Pat wants to put American interests first, and to Zionists, that is an unforgivable sin. You either put Israeli interests first, or you're a horrible anti-semite. There is no third alternative or middle ground.

Pat isn't any more hostile to Israel than he is to, say, China or Russia or Britain or India. He simply doesn't want any foreign country subverting American interests, and Israel is no exception.

Not making Israel the exception is what causes them to perceive Pat as "hostile". To Jewish supremacists, anything less than total subservience to Jewish/Israeli interests is no different than being a modern day Hitler.

Notice they had no real problem with Pat during the Cold War when Pat was pro-Israel; they only had a problem with Pat when he ceased to toe the Zionist line.

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